Iwaizumi was having A Day. That was the only way he could really put it in his head, or at least he thought so. It was almost Valentine's Day, which meant that there were way too many people at the flower shop for his liking, all scrambling to get the same red roses they had sold out of a few hours before. They'd stayed open an extra half hour, and with all of the desperate last-minute orders and frantic lovers in their shop, he was exhausted by the end of the day, and just wanted to be away from the crowds.
He had gotten home to find that he hadn't had any food in his fridge, and even though it was his own fault for not going grocery shopping, it still frustrated him as he cooked rice with the last of the chicken and vegetables he'd found at the back of his fridge.
When he'd gone to take the garbage out, he'd found that raccoons had gotten into the trash, and spread it all over the ground in the small alley out back of his house. He sighed, dropped his bag next to the mess, and returned a moment later with big yellow dishwashing gloves to start picking up the pieces of trash and collecting them back into the bins. It took him much longer than he'd hoped it would, and he shivered in the slight chill of the evening. He righted the bin and took a step back, looking upward as he did, to the clear sky above him. He shivered again and began to turn back to go indoors when something caught his eye. A glint of light, moving across the sky, above him.
He cocked his head slightly, following the light as it traced a faint arc, moving across the sky much faster than a satellite would be moving. It could have been a plane, but it didn't have the right shape… something about it was off. He followed it with his eyes for a moment, and narrowed his eyes when he saw the thing change direction mid-fall. He didn't know much about flying transport of any kind, but there was no way that something would be able to pivot its trajectory like that. It just didn't make sense.
The wind rustled in the trees around him, and he wrapped his hands around his biceps, rubbing them up and down against the cold, wishing he had brought a jacket with him to this short trip out to the trash. He looked back up at the speck as it moved back across the sky, and he thought it seemed just a bit bigger than it had been. Bigger…
He widened and narrowed his eyes again, trying to get a better read on it. It grew slightly larger, a speck growing into a spot into a circle and into something even more, and Iwaizumi realized that he was not just looking at something that was coming toward Earth; he was looking at something that was coming toward him.
He turned from the thing—a meteorite, he figured, or something fallen from the sky otherwise—and dashed back into his house. He registered the warmth of inside vaguely, his skin tingling with goosebumps, and he closed the door behind him, as if that was going to do something against the thing falling to the earth outside. He moved swiftly toward the center of his small house, squatting down in a doorway, his hands covering his head. That was the way he had been told to stay safe during an earthquake, and thought this was just about the opposite of that kind of disaster, he figured it couldn't be that far off point to take this kind of precaution.
He closed his eyes and took a breath, and a thought came to the top of his mind: This is a fitting end to this day. He opened his eyes at this, staring down between his knees to his shoes. Fitting? Maybe—one thing after the other, cumulating with the arrival of some sort of space debris that was coming down toward his house. What if it hit his house? What if it hit him?
He waited, and it took a moment. He heard nothing except for the faint sounds of a wind outside. There was a moment where he felt cold, even inside, and that chill paused the space around him, as if he was suspended in the absence of time.
Then, it hit.
The impact sent a tremor through the house—not a large one, but one that was definitely tangible. Iwaizumi felt his muscles tense, and he gritted his teeth against it, but it was not as big as he thought it would be. There were small thunks as bits of dirt and clumps of grass whacked against his back windows, and a brief light that died out from the impact.
Then, the whole world went still again. The wind still whistled faintly outside, but Iwaizumi paid it no mind. He still felt that strange chill, and he trembled, standing slowly—whether the tremble was from the cold or from the thing that just crash-landed in his backyard, he wasn't sure. He wasn't looking to delve much deeper into that, either, because he really only had one course of action, and it lay smoldering in a crater somewhere halfway through his small garden, judging by what little he could see through the now-dirty windows.
He moved slowly to the backdoor, carefully gripping the doorknob and opening it to the chill of the evening air. He registered faintly that he should have gone back for a jacket or something, but he also registered that there was some sort of meteorite half-submerged halfway through the patch of frozen earth that, come springtime, would have some tomatoes and cabbages. The edges of the space rock glowed a faint orange, but the center of it was a matte gray, in a smooth, roundish surface. It was spattered with half-frozen dirt, as was most of the backyard at this point. Iwaizumi absentmindedly shut the back door behind him and took a step toward the thing. He could begin to feel the heat radiating outward from it on his bare arms, and shuffled forward a bit more.
Whatever this thing was, it didn't seem to be an ordinary piece of rock. There was, of course, the fact that it had just fallen from the sky, but also that it was too smooth and spherical to not be artificial in construction. Could it have been a satellite, knocked off of its orbit? Iwaizumi didn't know about any spherical satellites, but he didn't really know about any satellites, so he wasn't about to rule out the possibility. He reached a hand out in front of him, as if to touch it, but then pulled it back. He didn't know anything about satellites, but he did know that if something was glowing red and had just fallen through the atmosphere, it was going to be hot. He was midway through considering whether or not oven mitts would offer adequate protection from the metal when something on its surface moved.
He took a half-step backward, holding his hand up in defense. The metal on the surface pushed upward in a three-foot-wide circle about a half an inch, and began to separate outward from the middle, sliding back against the hot metal surface beneath it. Iwaizumi wanted to see what was inside of the hole, but he also had the good sense to realize that could possibly be a very terrible idea and kept his distance.
Nothing happened for a half a moment, a hissing as some trails of vapor trailed from the inside of the sphere. It dissipated into the air, and Iwaizumi kept his eyes on the hole, barely noticing the chill as it encroached on the rapidly diminishing heat from the meteoroid-turned-satellite-turned-something else entirely.
For a moment, there was nothing.
Then, there was something—a faint movement of a pale bluish gray-inside of the hole, barely visible in the light coming from the stars and from the windows of Iwaizumi's house. Iwaizumi let himself blink, wondering if he had really seen anything at all, but then he caught the movement again. The gray mass moved upward, and was soon joined by two wide, black masses.
Standing in front of him was something he'd seen on TV, books, and in emojis, but something he'd never expected to see in real life. Standing in front of him was a gray alien, or at least it seemed to be. A large, wide head that tapered to a narrow chin, with a skinny neck, long torso with matching long arms, which came to three-fingered hands. Iwaizumi wanted to take a step back, to turn and run, to do anything, but his body didn't seem to want to comply. He stood there, motionless, staring.
The alien cocked its head at a slight angle and its small mouth moved. "Lì'upe?"
Iwaizumi's eyes widened, and out of sheer impulse rather than an actual move to make communication, he responded "What?"
"Tsalì'uri alu what, ral lu'upe?" The alien was moving without moving, its features changing as it spoke."Tswa'fko, kewong."
The alien was growing taller, and its features were shifting—its eyes becoming smaller, its arms becoming shorter, its shoulders broadening and its proportions becoming more regular, more… human.
Iwaizumi honestly did not know what to do. He stood rooted in his spot, his skin prickling as some wind ruffled his tee shirt from behind. The alien was growing a mop of brown hair, and its skin was turning from that bluish gray to a more human skin tone.
"Peseng…?" The alien wiggled its mouth, and Iwaizumi could have been sure that it wiggled as if it had been liquid, rippling like a pond in which a pebble had been dropped. "Oh, okay. That's—okay. That is the language you speak."
It was talking to him. The alien was talking to him. It had figured out how to speak in human language and looked like a human and was talking to him. Iwaizumi stared at the form of a naked man in front of him and made eye contact for a half of a second before looking away to see the alien's chest, which was bare. This led to Iwaizumi to look lower, and then immediately re-avert his eyes to the alien's face.
"Who are you?" Iwaizumi was surprised to find the words in his own mouth, but he let them come out. He watched as the alien put its hands on the outside of the spaceship, probing at the hot-but-cooling surface, and began to climb out, one human-shaped leg after the other.
"I am Srer Syulang." It moved forward, taking one step after another, and stopping a few feet away from Iwaizumi. He rocked back on his heels, as if to take a step back, but hesitated. The alien was looking all around him, not particularly paying attention to Iwaizumi at all, though he seemed to address him while they were speaking. "What is your called?"
"What?" asked Iwaizumi. The alien pulled its eyes up to Iwaizumi's again, and its brown eyes, still so new from their formation from those black voids they were before, and narrowed its eyelids for a moment before opening them wider again.
"Excuse me—my body is still rearranging itself to fit the life of your planet." The alien paused, as if to let this reach Iwaizumi, and continued: "My name is Tooru Oikawa. What is your name?"
Iwaizumi slightly raised one eyebrow and replied, "Hajime Iwaizumi." As he did, he crossed his arms, from the cold. The alien—Oikawa—noted this and focused on his arms.
"Iwaizumi Hajime, you have strong forelimbs. Proportionally," said the alien, taking a step forward, "you have developed further than many others of your kind."
"What?"
The alien moved another step closer, and Iwaizumi finally yielded a bit, taking a half step backward, away from the encroaching alien in the form of a naked man.
"And you seem to—yes, you have an internal body heat!" Oikawa clapped its hands together in delight, the quickest movement it had made since emerging from the spacecraft. It seemed to Iwaizumi that this shapeshifting alien was acting like an overexcited child. "But your thermoregulation must be off-balance, due to the temperature! Here, I will warm you!"
"What are you—no!" Iwaizumi both took a step back and held his arms out to push the alien backward, but it was more quick and agile than its initial baby steps would have indicated, and its arms—stronger than they looked, considering that they were both sort of skinny and recently formed from gray alien through an oddly liquid transformation—were tight around his arms and chest. He struggled against the embrace, but as the alien stayed latched on, he could feel his body warming.
That did not want him to have this literal space alien latched onto him any longer, however, and Iwaizumi pushed Oikawa backward, prying his arms off of him.
"I can thermoregulate fine, thanks," said Iwaizumi. The alien's lips stretched into a grin, and for a half a second Iwaizumi was stricken by how human it seemed. Then, he remembered that it was nighttime in February, and Oikawa was standing in front of him, naked, recently fallen from the sky. There was nothing remotely human about it.
They stood there for another moment, sizing each other up. Oikawa's eyes, having apparently taken their fill of the rest of their surroundings, seemed to be focused only on Iwaizumi, which meant that Iwaizumi found himself inspecting just about anything but the alien. It was while he was carefully avoiding the alien's gaze and staring directly at the now-empty crashed spacecraft that Iwaizumi realized just how warm Oikawa's embrace had been, compared to the chilly air around him. And the alien was completely naked. He sighed, and began to regret his invitation before it even began to broach his lips.
"Tooru, I don't know where you came from, but do you want to come inside? It is cold outside."
The alien's eyes lit up, and its small grin grew about three times its size—much larger than Iwaizumi thought was possible on a human face, another reminder of his visitor's otherworldliness—and nodded. "Yes," it said.
Iwaizumi didn't move for another moment, but then turned and began to lead the way to the dirty back of his house, which was splattered with half-frozen clumps of dirt from the impact of Oikawa's crash landing. He wasn't sure how this had all happened, but he had a feeling that this was going to be A Night.
A/N: The alien language Oikawa speaks before he figures out how humans speak is Na'vi, and rougly translates as follows:
"Tsalì'uri alu what, ral lu'upe?" - What does "what" mean?
"Tswa'fko, kewong." - Forget it, alien.
"Peseng…?" - Where...?
Also, just so I don't have to worry about it and for the purposes of this AU: Oikawa is an alien and aliens don't have the same concepts of human gender because they aren't human and gender is a social construct. However, because Iwaizumi is the first human he comes into contact with, he adapts his body to be somewhat similar in structure while disguised as a human (in this case, cisgender male human) and uses he/him pronouns when speaking as a human. That being said, we'll get a heck of a lot more in-depth with alien biology later I think (because I'm way too interested in the little details where they don't matter) and basically his true gender is more of a fluid/not a gender.